Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► There's a new Grey video! There is! Congratulations! Thank you! The wanderer has returned! Yeah, it's an

00:00:06 ◼   ► actual real animated video! I was thinking about this because I was trying to put it in your terms

00:00:14 ◼   ► for these things, you know, and I was I wanted to to say like what was the last one? Like the actual

00:00:20 ◼   ► real full last what you would consider regular video? Uh yeah, it's whenever Tiffany was, that was

00:00:27 ◼   ► like the last real video. The follow-up to that video, you don't class as one of these because it

00:00:33 ◼   ► was also gray in the real world a bit, right? Yeah, this is where I have my completely nonsense

00:00:40 ◼   ► categories that mean nothing to anyone else. I'm even getting confused. The way I'm trying to work

00:00:45 ◼   ► this out is by looking at the thumbnails on your YouTube page, but there isn't consistency to those

00:00:53 ◼   ► even. I have a very clear system for differences that nobody cares about. There's "real" videos,

00:01:00 ◼   ► which have the little side banner with the grey logo, that is the grey version of the grey logo.

00:01:07 ◼   ► There's "grey goes outside" videos, which have the green version of the grey logo,

00:01:13 ◼   ► but in my head those aren't "real" videos, even when in the case like with the testing Tesla video

00:01:20 ◼   ► where I spend as much time on a "gray goes outside" video as I would on a real video.

00:01:24 ◼   ► And then there's the videos that don't get a sidebar, which I categorize as "light gray"

00:01:32 ◼   ► videos. Those are like extra videos. Those are also not real videos, even though like with

00:01:39 ◼   ► "Someone Dead Ruined My Life Again," where they might take four times as much effort as a real

00:01:46 ◼   ► video so this categorization system makes a lot of sense.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I think you need another category.

00:01:51 ◼   ► What other category do I need?

00:01:52 ◼   ► So like a category that would include Someone Dead Ruin My Life Again.

00:01:56 ◼   ► That's a light grey video.

00:01:57 ◼   ► But it doesn't have a like a sidebar thing.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Right, that's how you know it's a light grey video.

00:02:02 ◼   ► But that and the like uncut Tesla self-driving Bay are on urban roads, they are completely

00:02:08 ◼   ► different.

00:02:09 ◼   ► No, that those it's all extra stuff Myke, those are all the same sorts of things, right?

00:02:14 ◼   ► that someone dead video took ages to make. And the uncut Tesla self-dry, it's just like,

00:02:20 ◼   ► you just, that didn't do any work on that, surely.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Look, the category of light grey videos is very clear. I created that category for some

00:02:29 ◼   ► light and easy to make videos, and now I also put stuff like someone dead ruined my life.

00:02:34 ◼   ► Right, exactly. So I think the light grey thing is fine, of like, this is additional

00:02:39 ◼   ► But then like there is another... I don't know why someone dead ruined my life again isn't a "Gory Goes Outside" video.

00:02:46 ◼   ► Well, I didn't go outside.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Yeah, you did. You're in the library and stuff in that one, right?

00:02:50 ◼   ► Oh, I mean, okay. Yeah, I guess I did go outside. It doesn't feel like it.

00:02:55 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:02:57 ◼   ► Because I would also argue that "Sharks" is in the wrong category.

00:03:00 ◼   ► You put that as a "Gory Goes Outside" video and I don't think it is. I think it should be a regular video.

00:03:05 ◼   ► Okay, you have raised an excellent point here because

00:03:08 ◼   ► Sharks I have categorized as Grey Goes Outside because I found the sharks outside.

00:03:15 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:03:19 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, but the entire interstate highway system of America, that's definitely inside that one."

00:03:27 ◼   ► Well no, but okay, that one's clear. That one's really- that one's all animated, right? That's different.

00:03:31 ◼   ► But I'm realizing, as you say it, it never occurred to me that Someone Dead Ruined My Life should be a Grey Goes Outside video,

00:03:38 ◼   ► Because that's ridiculous, that's not a Greygoes outside video, but I 100% spent more time outside of my office

00:03:48 ◼   ► working on the "Someone Dead Ruined My Life Again" video than I did for the sharks video.

00:03:53 ◼   ► See, because my argument is both Someone Dead and Sharks, they should be regular videos.

00:03:59 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:04:00 ◼   ► Because they are so different to the vlog videos that you've done, that like, I don't think that they—

00:04:07 ◼   ► Not that I'm saying anything bad about your whole vlog videos, but I think you are doing those videos a disservice in your mind by thinking of them that way.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Because I also think it would... Let's imagine you as a person who tracks everything.

00:04:20 ◼   ► Like if you tracked those videos as Grey goes outside, it completely tips the scale, I think, of what those videos should be.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Like the Tesla one being a... The two Tesla ones you've done really being outliers.

00:04:32 ◼   ► They both took way longer than they should have.

00:04:34 ◼   ► But your other ones, like your escape from lockdown or the video when you got vaccinated,

00:04:38 ◼   ► like they no way took tons and tons and tons of time because they're simpler.

00:04:45 ◼   ► So then like sharks and someone dead, they took, must have taken ages because they had

00:04:50 ◼   ► a little animation stuff in them.

00:04:52 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:04:53 ◼   ► No, they took forever.

00:04:54 ◼   ► So they don't feel like Grey goes outside.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Also I found another category.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Well, I know there's the game one.

00:04:59 ◼   ► I'm talking about that.

00:05:00 ◼   ► There's one that's blue.

00:05:01 ◼   ► What's the blue one?

00:05:02 ◼   ► Oh, the blue is Q&A videos.

00:05:04 ◼   ► - Right, okay.

00:05:05 ◼   ► Well, but thinking about, is thinking about lockdowns,

00:05:08 ◼   ► is that a Q&A video?

00:05:10 ◼   ► - The problem with the Q&A that's thinking about lockdowns

00:05:13 ◼   ► is the reason it's 13 minutes long is that 100%

00:05:17 ◼   ► should have been two videos,

00:05:19 ◼   ► because that one starts with like six minutes

00:05:22 ◼   ► of just actually what the title is.

00:05:25 ◼   ► It's like, oh, here's how to think about lockdowns

00:05:27 ◼   ► in a general way.

00:05:28 ◼   ► And then it just segues into a Q&A for no reason.

00:05:31 ◼   ► So that video is one of those things in retrospect,

00:05:34 ◼   ► you look at it as like the person who made it and you go, "Why did I put those two together?"

00:05:40 ◼   ► It's because I was making them at the same, like I was writing this as one big script

00:05:44 ◼   ► and the section at the start just kept getting bigger and bigger.

00:05:47 ◼   ► I totally should have cut that into two.

00:05:49 ◼   ► But no, the blue one, that's blue because thinking about lockdowns is a Q&A video, even

00:05:55 ◼   ► though you don't find out until six minutes in, so.

00:05:59 ◼   ► Spaceship U has no categorization on its thumbnail.

00:06:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I put that as an extra video.

00:06:05 ◼   ► That's a light gray video.

00:06:06 ◼   ► - What?

00:06:07 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

00:06:09 ◼   ► Oh man.

00:06:10 ◼   ► - I don't know, it just feels like it's a light gray video.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Look, I'm not saying that this categorization system

00:06:15 ◼   ► has some real solid borders here.

00:06:17 ◼   ► - You couldn't say that.

00:06:19 ◼   ► How machines learn, the bar is on the other side,

00:06:22 ◼   ► some, and why die, the little gray logo

00:06:25 ◼   ► is on the other side of the,

00:06:26 ◼   ► I was not expecting to review the thumbnails

00:06:28 ◼   ► your channel today, but now I'm fascinated by it.

00:06:31 ◼   ► This is actually one of these things I am shocked I don't get a thousand comments

00:06:35 ◼   ► about this all the time about moving the logo and it's one of these things I just thought

00:06:39 ◼   ► everyone would notice and lose their minds that I swap sides but basically no one has

00:06:44 ◼   ► ever commented on it.

00:06:45 ◼   ► I found another category.

00:06:46 ◼   ► Okay.

00:06:47 ◼   ► Lord of the Rings.

00:06:48 ◼   ► It's just gold.

00:06:50 ◼   ► You've just made the logo gold in those ones.

00:06:52 ◼   ► Yeah that's just to match the Lord of the Rings.

00:06:54 ◼   ► I know, but it's funny, but now we have another category now. We have a Lord of the Rings

00:06:58 ◼   ► category.

00:06:59 ◼   ► Yeah, that's not a separate category, that's the main Grey Explains video. I don't need

00:07:04 ◼   ► to justify my thumbnails to you. But I kind of do.

00:07:07 ◼   ► I think we need to know, we started it. But I do consider Lord of the Rings its own category

00:07:12 ◼   ► now though. So there's Grey, light grey, Grey grows outside, Lord of the Rings.

00:07:18 ◼   ► I'm gonna assume, by the way, you have not watched and will not watch the trailer for

00:07:22 ◼   ► the Lord of the Rings show.

00:07:24 ◼   ► I have no interest in that show.

00:07:26 ◼   ► That show is doomed from the moment it was conceived.

00:07:29 ◼   ► - I have a big problem with the trailer.

00:07:31 ◼   ► - Okay, what's your problem with the trailer?

00:07:33 ◼   ► - It's like a semantic thing,

00:07:35 ◼   ► where they're trying to make it like it's this cool,

00:07:36 ◼   ► smart thing that they're doing,

00:07:38 ◼   ► but really it makes no sense to me.

00:07:40 ◼   ► So they're showing a bunch of footage or whatever.

00:07:42 ◼   ► This is before the fellowship, before the king.

00:07:47 ◼   ► - That doesn't make any sense.

00:07:48 ◼   ► - Before the ring.

00:07:49 ◼   ► - So there's a lot of kings

00:07:51 ◼   ► in the Lord of the Rings universe.

00:07:53 ◼   ► It wasn't just the one.

00:07:54 ◼   ► It's not like Before the Ring.

00:07:56 ◼   ► The show is about the rings.

00:07:57 ◼   ► Like that's the whole thing, right?

00:08:00 ◼   ► So it's quote before, but like this show is called

00:08:03 ◼   ► The Rings of Power.

00:08:05 ◼   ► So sure, maybe they didn't make the ring yet or whatever,

00:08:07 ◼   ► but obviously the, anyway, they're just trying to make it

00:08:10 ◼   ► seem like before the three movies,

00:08:12 ◼   ► but I think it just sounds so stupid, right?

00:08:15 ◼   ► Before the Ring, The Lord of the Rings.

00:08:17 ◼   ► It's like, well, what are they the Lord of

00:08:19 ◼   ► if there are no rings?

00:08:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean--

00:08:21 ◼   ► I understand, like I get it, right?

00:08:24 ◼   ► Like it's, I'm sure this is set before the rings were even a thing, but then it's just

00:08:28 ◼   ► funny to call it the Lord of the Rings then, isn't it?

00:08:30 ◼   ► Which I think inherently is maybe the concern you have over it, which is like, they actually

00:08:36 ◼   ► can't tell any of the stories that anybody loves, I guess, because they can't use,

00:08:41 ◼   ► Amazon are not allowed to use any of the characters.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I look at the original Lord of the Rings movies as just a miracle of adapting a completely

00:08:49 ◼   ► unadaptable work. Forever in my mind, the original Lord of the Rings trilogy wins. Best

00:08:55 ◼   ► adaptation of an unadaptable book. But when I heard that Amazon was spending a hundred

00:09:01 ◼   ► billion dollars to adapt some but not all of the Cimarillion, I was like, "Boy, you've

00:09:09 ◼   ► lost before you started. I don't need to know any more information then. Oh, we're

00:09:14 ◼   ► gonna make a TV show out of the Cimarillion. Okay, I hope you don't spend a lot of money

00:09:18 ◼   ► on it.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Oh.

00:09:20 ◼   ► In all seriousness, I don't know if you know the number, but they paid $250 million for

00:09:26 ◼   ► the rights.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And then $465 million for the first season is what it cost to make.

00:09:32 ◼   ► So they're up to $715 million spent so far.

00:09:37 ◼   ► I haven't been following it.

00:09:38 ◼   ► It's impossible to spend...

00:09:40 ◼   ► There's no...

00:09:41 ◼   ► Surely there is no expectation of any return on that money, right?

00:09:47 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:09:48 ◼   ► think look my opinion with any of this kind of stuff is hey you want to make a great movie you

00:09:55 ◼   ► want to make a great tv show you know what the most important part of this is the writing of it

00:10:01 ◼   ► that's the critical thing is spend some time on the scripts and lord of the rings falls into the

00:10:09 ◼   ► same category as my head as when apple announced they were going to also spend a hundred billion

00:10:14 ◼   ► dollars on Foundation and as soon as I heard that it was the same thing of like, "Oh,

00:10:20 ◼   ► you've lost before you've begun. You're going to try to adapt the Foundation stories?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Good luck with that." And then I watched one episode of that TV show and was like,

00:10:29 ◼   ► "Yep, it's totally failed."

00:10:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't see that one, yep. You know, I've never seen The Lord of the Rings.

00:10:34 ◼   ► Oh yeah? I don't know if I recommend it. I like it.

00:10:37 ◼   ► I think you more than like The Lord of the Rings.

00:10:39 ◼   ► Oh yeah, no, no. I guess what I mean here is I'm just saying I actually just had the

00:10:43 ◼   ► same thing where I just watched Dune quite recently and had the same sort of feeling of,

00:10:47 ◼   ► "Oh, I really enjoyed that." I cannot experience it as a movie. I can only experience it as an

00:10:54 ◼   ► adaptation. So it makes it impossible for me to give a general recommendation. And it's the same

00:11:01 ◼   ► with Lord of the Rings. It's like, "Oh, I love those movies. Can I recommend them? I don't know.

00:11:05 ◼   ► I just can't perceive them as anything other than an adaptation. And I just don't know how they work

00:11:10 ◼   ► for someone unfamiliar with the source material.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Anyway, I recommend people watch my Lord of the Rings videos rather than watching the

00:11:21 ◼   ► Lord of the Rings Amazon show.

00:11:23 ◼   ► What you're saying is Amazon should give you $715 million.

00:11:27 ◼   ► Yes, and I can promise them I will make one more video.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I think it would be a better investment.

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00:13:23 ◼   ► and all of Relay FM.

00:13:25 ◼   ► - So yes, the last time I had a video

00:13:28 ◼   ► that had the proper sidebar badge on it is six months ago.

00:13:33 ◼   ► So yeah, it's been a while since the main one,

00:13:36 ◼   ► but it's up, it's doing well, people seem to like it.

00:13:38 ◼   ► - It's doing really well.

00:13:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, you never know what kind of reaction

00:13:41 ◼   ► you're gonna get from these videos.

00:13:43 ◼   ► It's always one of those things of like,

00:13:44 ◼   ► oh God, hold your breath, upload it,

00:13:47 ◼   ► see if people like it,

00:13:48 ◼   ► but it's been pretty positively received,

00:13:50 ◼   ► people seem happy in the comments, so yeah.

00:13:53 ◼   ► It only took half a year.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Well, it also took a great occasion too, right?

00:13:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:58 ◼   ► So behind the scenes for the production of this, I'd mentioned in the last few

00:14:02 ◼   ► episodes, how I felt really tapped out, particularly over the holidays and was

00:14:07 ◼   ► just, I was just having a hard time kind of getting back into the actual flow of

00:14:11 ◼   ► work.

00:14:11 ◼   ► And so I did make the decision at the end of January.

00:14:15 ◼   ► I'm like, okay, it's time to play the winning card here of I'm going to go on

00:14:21 ◼   ► a great occasion in case of emergency.

00:14:23 ◼   ► Break glass.

00:14:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:24 ◼   ► Of course, now my whole brain is just filled with magic metaphors, so I'm like,

00:14:28 ◼   ► "What would be the casting cost of Gracation, and what would that card do?"

00:14:31 ◼   ► Your tweets are absolutely nonsensical.

00:14:35 ◼   ► Like, every now and then, to me, it looks like you've been hacked now.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Because you say this stuff.

00:14:42 ◼   ► Let me get an example of this.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Legendary artifact creature equipment jellyfish.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:47 ◼   ► I saw you tweet this the other day, I was like, "What the f***? What is that?"

00:14:53 ◼   ► And then I looked in the replies and was like, "Oh, it's magic. Okay."

00:14:57 ◼   ► So yeah, everything is like magic metaphors in my brain now. So I was like, "Oh yeah, play

00:15:02 ◼   ► Gracation. What would that be? Like three blue and a white, take an extra turn, something like that?

00:15:08 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:15:08 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I'm all right.

00:15:09 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm not gonna do this. I'll let people in the comments come up with what would Gracation

00:15:13 ◼   ► be as a card. But yeah, this is always my just basically always works trick. And I felt like

00:15:21 ◼   ► I'm just having too much of a hard time getting back into a good rhythm of work.

00:15:25 ◼   ► I was just being too inconsistent about it and just very frustrated.

00:15:28 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I ended up taking a great vacation.

00:15:32 ◼   ► It was a very funny one for me because I actually just stayed in London.

00:15:37 ◼   ► It was the first time I've done this since back when I was a teacher.

00:15:41 ◼   ► But yeah, I just picked a hotel in a different spot in the city and went

00:15:47 ◼   ► there for 10, 12 days in the end.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And yeah, this is my...

00:15:52 ◼   ► Okay, you arrive, and the trick is to sort of show up with a particular mindset of

00:16:00 ◼   ► "This is serious time, Brain. Look, you can see how serious we are,

00:16:04 ◼   ► because we're in a different location. We've gone through a minor pain in the butt of packing up,

00:16:11 ◼   ► and traveling, and going to this spot, and now we're going to stay in this room,

00:16:17 ◼   ► and I know you want to wander all over the place, Brain, but that's not gonna happen.

00:16:23 ◼   ► We're just in this room, we've brought our nice keyboard, I've set up like a weird standing desk

00:16:29 ◼   ► situation, and this is what we're gonna do. We're just gonna work on this stuff.

00:16:33 ◼   ► And yeah, it's extreme, but I always find like these are just the absolute most productive

00:16:39 ◼   ► times for me is when I really kind of seal off in this. And like this time it's also really good to

00:16:46 ◼   ► reboot and just get back into the proper habit of working.

00:16:51 ◼   ► And with this video in particular, there was one problem that I was having, which was

00:16:55 ◼   ► I've rarely had a video where getting the audio right was just so hard.

00:17:03 ◼   ► And personally, this is my least favorite part of making all of the videos, is recording the audio.

00:17:09 ◼   ► It's the one time in the process where I feel a huge resistance,

00:17:15 ◼   ► like I just never want to record the final audio. Part of that is because it's like,

00:17:20 ◼   ► well now it's actually locked in. You can't make any changes. This is just the way the

00:17:24 ◼   ► video is going to have to be. And part of it is, I just hate it and I find it really hard.

00:17:31 ◼   ► But with this one, my final count was I did three recordings, each of which were

00:17:39 ◼   ► three takes. So it took a total of nine takes before I got audio that I liked, and the final

00:17:46 ◼   ► version that went up on the YouTube channel was a combination of the last three takes. On average,

00:17:52 ◼   ► the number of takes I have to do for videos has slowly gone down over the years, but this was just

00:17:56 ◼   ► like a sudden explosion in "oh it's all wrong." And part of it is also in the process of making

00:18:01 ◼   ► these videos, I do a rough audio first that we do rough animations to to try to just spot if

00:18:07 ◼   ► if there's any problems in the script.

00:18:10 ◼   ► And even the rough audio, I was like, "Oh god, I hate it.

00:18:13 ◼   ► I hate it so much.

00:18:14 ◼   ► It's just not working at all."

00:18:15 ◼   ► Anyway, the trick that I figured out with this one was...

00:18:18 ◼   ► So if you've watched a bunch of my videos, you'll know that there is a wide range of

00:18:24 ◼   ► the speed of how fast I talk.

00:18:27 ◼   ► And my general rule here is that if I'm talking very fast, it's because the viewer doesn't

00:18:33 ◼   ► need to follow the details.

00:18:34 ◼   ► I'm just trying to give an overview of, "Oh look, this stuff is really complicated.

00:18:39 ◼   ► You don't need to know all the details, it's fine, we're just going to quickly blast through

00:18:44 ◼   ► it."

00:18:45 ◼   ► And that's what talking fast is to the listener.

00:18:47 ◼   ► It's like an indication of, "You're not supposed to remember all these details."

00:18:50 ◼   ► What I realized afterwards what the problem was is I thought that this video was a fast

00:18:57 ◼   ► talking video.

00:18:58 ◼   ► And it's partly because I thought, "This isn't actually like a huge topic, this is fairly

00:19:03 ◼   ► constrained as topics go. So when I would record the audio and it was long, I'd go,

00:19:09 ◼   ► "Oh, I shouldn't have this 10 minute audio thing here. I should talk way faster. Like

00:19:13 ◼   ► this should be a six minute video." And so I would, basically the first takes that I

00:19:18 ◼   ► did, the first six were all too fast. And I realized afterwards, "No, it does need to

00:19:24 ◼   ► be slow." Because even though this is a video which is sort of talking about the system

00:19:28 ◼   ► is complicated, I think I didn't realize for a bit, "Oh, the first 80% of this, I really

00:19:35 ◼   ► do want the listener to follow all the details." Like, yes, there's a lot of stuff, but I was

00:19:40 ◼   ► just going through it too fast, so I ended up slowing down my narration by about 30%

00:19:46 ◼   ► for the last few takes. Oh, okay, this is way better. Like, I don't know why I had it

00:19:50 ◼   ► in my head that this should have been a much shorter video and should have been a much

00:19:54 ◼   ► faster video. This one, the viewer actually can follow what's happening in the first 80%

00:19:58 ◼   ► sense but that ate up a bunch of my greatcation time was just forcing myself to do the recordings

00:20:06 ◼   ► and then also edit them together which is really time consuming and then have to make the decision

00:20:13 ◼   ► at the end of each sort of two-day period of like "oh I just don't think this audio is good enough"

00:20:19 ◼   ► and then do it again and then do it again before I finally got the final audio so yeah sometimes

00:20:25 ◼   ► you just really need to force yourself into a situation where you're gonna do the work,

00:20:29 ◼   ► and this was definitely necessary this time.

00:20:31 ◼   ► - There's a lot of information in this one.

00:20:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's why the fast talking just didn't work as much,

00:20:37 ◼   ► and I just don't know why I thought that it would, but I'm very glad I slowed it down,

00:20:41 ◼   ► and I think it's been well received partly because of that.

00:20:43 ◼   ► I think it would not have been nearly as well liked if I was blasting through at my original pace.

00:20:47 ◼   ► - Do you remember if the version you sent me, was that the final audio,

00:20:51 ◼   ► or did you give it another go after that?

00:20:53 ◼   ► I think I sent you the version with the audio as it currently is. I'm fairly certain about that.

00:20:58 ◼   ► I think it didn't have music, but I can't remember.

00:21:00 ◼   ► It had music. It was too loud. That was my thing.

00:21:03 ◼   ► Oh, right. That's right. You didn't like the music. You thought the music was too loud. Yes.

00:21:06 ◼   ► For me anyway. Maybe it... I don't remember.

00:21:09 ◼   ► Because I found that it was hard to me to keep track of what was going on.

00:21:12 ◼   ► Because it's a lot of information. And also, I mean, I don't know how this... if this video plays differently.

00:21:17 ◼   ► Like, I don't know the basics of any of this. Like, I'm not American.

00:21:22 ◼   ► Like I don't have any institutional knowledge about the interstate highway system.

00:21:28 ◼   ► I do wonder if this video plays differently in different places, maybe more than some

00:21:32 ◼   ► others.

00:21:33 ◼   ► Do you care intrinsically more about this if you're American?

00:21:36 ◼   ► Probably.

00:21:37 ◼   ► Well, so you've actually hit on something in the production process of this, but I'm

00:21:41 ◼   ► kind of curious, I should have asked you at the time, how did this play to you as someone

00:21:46 ◼   ► who is just totally unfamiliar with this?

00:21:49 ◼   ► and until recently has never even driven, right?

00:21:52 ◼   ► Do you have a driver's license yet?

00:21:54 ◼   ► You still don't, right?

00:21:55 ◼   ► - No, no driving license. - Okay, there we go.

00:21:57 ◼   ► - To me, it was kind of like,

00:21:59 ◼   ► I will say this one washed over me a little bit,

00:22:02 ◼   ► where I was like, okay, I thought it was pretty

00:22:05 ◼   ► and I was entertained, but I didn't care about it.

00:22:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, that makes total sense.

00:22:09 ◼   ► - And I can imagine that I maybe have a similar view,

00:22:13 ◼   ► but I bet that you have a lot of listeners in America

00:22:16 ◼   ► who really care.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Like this one seems like one of those videos where there's two types of people.

00:22:22 ◼   ► People that really care and people that don't care.

00:22:25 ◼   ► Cause it's just like this information is not interesting to me to keep in the long run.

00:22:29 ◼   ► But like it was intriguing.

00:22:31 ◼   ► My favorite part about it was just you going through all of the parts

00:22:35 ◼   ► where it didn't make sense.

00:22:36 ◼   ► That's what I liked.

00:22:37 ◼   ► No, that's, that stuff is always fun.

00:22:39 ◼   ► Just looking through the data.

00:22:40 ◼   ► And so about half of the views come from the United States.

00:22:44 ◼   ► Is that any different to other videos?

00:22:46 ◼   ► It's higher, but it's not a lot.

00:22:48 ◼   ► It's I'm just, just quickly glancing around.

00:22:50 ◼   ► It looks like 40% of the videos are normally from the United States.

00:22:54 ◼   ► So it's higher, but it's not crazy higher.

00:22:56 ◼   ► But I've given up guessing with the statistics on YouTube videos of like,

00:23:00 ◼   ► what are videos going to be like?

00:23:01 ◼   ► It doesn't mean anything.

00:23:02 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:23:03 ◼   ► It's like, it doesn't mean anything.

00:23:04 ◼   ► Well, okay.

00:23:04 ◼   ► We have that information.

00:23:05 ◼   ► We can draw a conclusion from it, but really.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:09 ◼   ► No, some of them are very funny.

00:23:10 ◼   ► You're like being someone who's not familiar with the interstates is part of

00:23:15 ◼   ► what kind of came up in the process of making this video.

00:23:18 ◼   ► So part of the difficulty of making these kinds of things is,

00:23:22 ◼   ► as always, when the final video goes up,

00:23:25 ◼   ► it always looks really simple.

00:23:28 ◼   ► And that's what's supposed to be the case.

00:23:30 ◼   ► You as the viewer are supposed to watch a video,

00:23:32 ◼   ► and I feel like I succeed

00:23:35 ◼   ► if the impression that people have is a little bit like,

00:23:38 ◼   ► "Oh, that was straightforward and simple

00:23:42 ◼   ► and sort of feeling like it shouldn't have taken him much time to put together that video at all.

00:23:47 ◼   ► Like, I understand why people have that feeling, because that's what the final presentation should be.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Here's a bunch of information. It's all in a nice order.

00:23:58 ◼   ► It's like it goes down nice and smooth, and it wraps up exactly when it's supposed to be.

00:24:03 ◼   ► But as always, before the video was written, when you're just looking at a blank page

00:24:08 ◼   ► and you're trying to write a script about something,

00:24:10 ◼   ► It is not remotely clear at all what even is the video.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And so part of what took a really long time with this one

00:24:18 ◼   ► is exactly this question that sort of you're hitting on is,

00:24:23 ◼   ► I didn't actually describe at any point,

00:24:28 ◼   ► yeah, but what are the interstate highways?

00:24:32 ◼   ► Why are they different?

00:24:33 ◼   ► Why are they a thing of any interest whatsoever?

00:24:36 ◼   ► Like it's just a bunch of roads.

00:24:38 ◼   ► And in my earlier versions of the script, there was a ton of stuff which was setting up.

00:24:45 ◼   ► Yeah, but what are the interstates?

00:24:47 ◼   ► Why are they different?

00:24:48 ◼   ► Why are they worth talking about in the first place?

00:24:50 ◼   ► So why would this numbering system even be something that anybody cares about?

00:24:55 ◼   ► But as the script went on and on and I kept doing more and more revisions,

00:25:00 ◼   ► I kind of cut down that further and further and further and further,

00:25:06 ◼   ► until at some point I made a decision which was,

00:25:09 ◼   ► okay, you know what?

00:25:10 ◼   ► This is a video for people who already know

00:25:14 ◼   ► what the interstates are.

00:25:16 ◼   ► They're already familiar with them.

00:25:17 ◼   ► - I don't think that if you explained it all to me

00:25:20 ◼   ► that I would necessarily have cared any more

00:25:23 ◼   ► about the interstate highway system.

00:25:25 ◼   ► - See, I disagree.

00:25:26 ◼   ► I think I could have made you care more

00:25:28 ◼   ► if I had put more of that stuff in.

00:25:30 ◼   ► - But like I enjoyed, I liked the visuals of this one

00:25:33 ◼   ► and I liked the weirdness part of it.

00:25:36 ◼   ► But what I mean is just think if you would have spent all that time explaining to me the history of the interstate system,

00:25:40 ◼   ► I don't...

00:25:42 ◼   ► It's like two things.

00:25:43 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, yeah.

00:25:44 ◼   ► And I don't think that the second part would have necessarily been enhanced by the first part for me.

00:25:49 ◼   ► This is why it ended up getting split.

00:25:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:52 ◼   ► Is because I thought, you know what, this just...

00:25:55 ◼   ► This doesn't work in here.

00:25:57 ◼   ► This is the problem when you make stuff, you're like,

00:25:59 ◼   ► you find all of this information that you love or like little facts that you go,

00:26:03 ◼   ► "Oh, that's totally delightful."

00:26:05 ◼   ► There's one piece of information I was just desperately trying to work in

00:26:10 ◼   ► anywhere in the script and it was just completely impossible.

00:26:13 ◼   ► And if you've ever written something, this is something over the years that I

00:26:17 ◼   ► try to keep in mind is like, that's a warning sign.

00:26:20 ◼   ► Like if there's a piece of information that you keep going, like where,

00:26:24 ◼   ► where can I put this in?

00:26:25 ◼   ► The answer is don't put this in.

00:26:28 ◼   ► You personally like it too much.

00:26:31 ◼   ► And it doesn't actually belong in this thing.

00:26:34 ◼   ► It should be easier to put it in if it actually belongs here.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And the little fact is that the interstate highway system was partly

00:26:42 ◼   ► built for the American military.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And so a lot of the specifications about how these roads have to be

00:26:50 ◼   ► relates to what the military wanted.

00:26:53 ◼   ► And one of the things that was in the original specification in, uh, I'm

00:26:58 ◼   ► just doing this off the top of my head.

00:26:59 ◼   ► So the dates might not be exactly right, but like the 1950s, no one

00:27:02 ◼   ► fact checks to show your family.

00:27:04 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:27:05 ◼   ► - Listen, Myke, people love to fact check

00:27:07 ◼   ► everything that I do, so it's just like,

00:27:09 ◼   ► I've got this whole world of people

00:27:11 ◼   ► who like to catch errors, and I totally get it.

00:27:14 ◼   ► But so, the original specifications for the highway was

00:27:18 ◼   ► all of the bridges that go over the interstate

00:27:22 ◼   ► have to have 14 feet of vertical clearance.

00:27:27 ◼   ► And the way they came up with 14 feet

00:27:30 ◼   ► was that was the height necessary to move the,

00:27:33 ◼   ► at the time, intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles around.

00:27:37 ◼   ► - Oh, good news.

00:27:38 ◼   ► - We need to drive these nuclear missiles around.

00:27:40 ◼   ► We need 14 feet of vertical clearance on all of the bridges.

00:27:43 ◼   ► - You don't want to bump a nuke, do you?

00:27:45 ◼   ► - You don't want to bump a nuke.

00:27:46 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

00:27:48 ◼   ► And so the Department of Transportation, like,

00:27:51 ◼   ► gave all the funding to these local states,

00:27:53 ◼   ► and the project was, like, hugely under development.

00:27:56 ◼   ► And then at some point in, like, 1968,

00:27:59 ◼   ► The military came back and said, "Hey, we've made our nukes way bigger.

00:28:05 ◼   ► We need 17 feet of clearance now on all of the bridges."

00:28:09 ◼   ► And to this day, the United States is still retrofitting a bunch of the

00:28:17 ◼   ► bridges that they built at 14 feet to make them 17 feet to fit the nukes.

00:28:22 ◼   ► It is this enormous project of, "Oh, we built a ton of bridges for 14 feet of

00:28:28 ◼   ► vertical clearance and now we need to make them 17 feet for the bigger nukes that the

00:28:32 ◼   ► military wants to move around. I love that piece of information and I was like I desperately

00:28:37 ◼   ► want to fit this in because it's just funny. You can also kind of imagine it visually as

00:28:42 ◼   ► like the stick figure girls arguing with each other about like but my nukes are bigger like

00:28:46 ◼   ► you need to make your bridges bigger. I had a bunch of stuff about that about like what

00:28:51 ◼   ► is the interstate really like what is this connected to but it all just slowly got cut

00:28:57 ◼   ► over time, but that Nuke one I was like, I was holding on to that one at the bitter end.

00:29:01 ◼   ► I was like, there's got to be a way I could squeeze this in. But the answer is no, don't

00:29:05 ◼   ► do that. Instead, just accept that for some videos, it makes sense to not actually explain

00:29:12 ◼   ► the whole thing. There are just times when you have to recognize, okay, just make the

00:29:16 ◼   ► thing for people who already know about the thing. I have tried for years as a style guide

00:29:22 ◼   ► to work with videos like, assume that the viewer is an intelligent person who just,

00:29:28 ◼   ► for whatever reason, has happened to never come across this topic before. And so like

00:29:34 ◼   ► when I'm writing scripts, I really do try most of the time to think, assume that the

00:29:39 ◼   ► person doesn't know anything at all about this and explain it from the start. But with

00:29:43 ◼   ► this one, I think it made sense as I kept drafting the script to get rid of all of this

00:29:48 ◼   ► other stuff about the interstate and just be like, "You know what? Not every video really

00:29:53 ◼   ► can be for everyone. This works better as a video for people who are already familiar

00:29:58 ◼   ► with this, which would be basically everyone in America where driving on the interstates

00:30:03 ◼   ► is already a big deal part of your life. Everyone knows these roads. There's basically nowhere

00:30:10 ◼   ► in America where you aren't constantly hyper aware of when you are on or are not on the

00:30:18 ◼   ► And it's just like, you can just assume that this is knowledge all Americans have about the interstates

00:30:24 ◼   ► and just run with it. Be like, "Hey, there's a thing about this thing that you probably never knew,

00:30:28 ◼   ► which is that the numbers mean something," and then just purely focus on that part.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And again, I know that all of this stuff sounds really obvious in retrospect once you have seen the video,

00:30:40 ◼   ► but it's hard to explain how it is not obvious at the start

00:30:45 ◼   ► What part is the part that just makes sense to focus on?

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00:33:09 ◼   ► I know that this information exists in a really clear way, I assume, for you to take it and

00:33:18 ◼   ► make a script out of, but I would imagine that the fact checking for this one would

00:33:22 ◼   ► be hard because I feel like this is one where there's lots of little details that people

00:33:29 ◼   ► living in those places know and you have to get it right to be happy.

00:33:36 ◼   ► Is it difficult to get this one nailed down?

00:33:39 ◼   ► - Let me back up just one moment there,

00:33:41 ◼   ► because if you think about this topic,

00:33:44 ◼   ► yeah, you are right.

00:33:45 ◼   ► You can go on the Wikipedia page

00:33:47 ◼   ► about the interstate highway system,

00:33:49 ◼   ► and then there is just a section

00:33:50 ◼   ► which explains the numbering system.

00:33:53 ◼   ► That's relatively straightforward.

00:33:54 ◼   ► - I mean, and there's maps, too.

00:33:55 ◼   ► That's what else I'm thinking, right?

00:33:57 ◼   ► For you to actually get the routes

00:33:59 ◼   ► and where they start and end, right?

00:34:00 ◼   ► You just look at maps.

00:34:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, that exists.

00:34:03 ◼   ► I think part of what I was talking about before

00:34:05 ◼   ► of the "how do you make this go down easy?"

00:34:09 ◼   ► like, "how do you make a video that is easily understandable?"

00:34:12 ◼   ► is, when you're reading something about this numbering system,

00:34:16 ◼   ► you have the advantage of it's much easier to jump back and jump ahead

00:34:21 ◼   ► if you don't understand something.

00:34:23 ◼   ► So you can go like, "Oh, okay, you read this part and you go ahead

00:34:26 ◼   ► and then you realize, 'Oh, I needed something from before'

00:34:29 ◼   ► and then read that bit again."

00:34:31 ◼   ► When you read something, you're reading it less linearly than you think you're reading it.

00:34:35 ◼   ► And so, if you want to make a video that is interesting and also understandable,

00:34:40 ◼   ► you can't just take, "Oh, here's the Wikipedia summary," and basically read it.

00:34:46 ◼   ► Like, I just don't think that makes for a really interesting video.

00:34:49 ◼   ► And you have to figure out, "What order am I explaining this?"

00:34:53 ◼   ► Presuming that someone can't go backwards.

00:34:55 ◼   ► And that's why in this video, it took me a while to break it down into making up

00:35:00 ◼   ► these three categories of interstates of like, oh, there's majors and there's

00:35:03 ◼   ► mediums and there's minors, which don't really exist as official designations

00:35:10 ◼   ► or anything like that's, that's not really a thing.

00:35:12 ◼   ► It's like a category I came up with because I was thinking about constellations

00:35:15 ◼   ► and like Ursa major and Ursa minor.

00:35:17 ◼   ► And it's like, okay, great.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I'm going to go with that.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Right.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Cause we have like this constellation theme.

00:35:22 ◼   ► But that's where it's actually harder to do it in video form than you think of like

00:35:27 ◼   ► What is the order in which you can kind of present this to people so that each thing?

00:35:32 ◼   ► Hopefully builds on the last thing. That's why you start with like here's the big broad ones going east to west

00:35:39 ◼   ► Right, which just even visually is the most clearest like these roads are going across

00:35:43 ◼   ► And then you have these roads going up and down and then you like you jump over to the miners

00:35:50 ◼   ► which then makes sense to say, "Okay, these are the little bits that break off."

00:35:54 ◼   ► And then you can kind of go back to the mediums as like,

00:35:57 ◼   ► "These are the ones that are in the middle."

00:35:59 ◼   ► But even creating these categories helps a listener know,

00:36:04 ◼   ► "We've moved on to a different kind of thing."

00:36:08 ◼   ► Like, it's a little signal, like, "That part is over. Here's the next part.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Hopefully this part builds on it."

00:36:14 ◼   ► So, like, that's part of the trick of it.

00:36:17 ◼   ► it and I think also having, it's not really necessary, but even just having some kind

00:36:25 ◼   ► of additional metaphor like, oh, it's, it's navigations, it's constellations. I think

00:36:31 ◼   ► that does help give your brain something else to hold onto to like pin this explanation

00:36:37 ◼   ► to as, as it exists. So yeah, like there's, there's some tricks that might not be obvious

00:36:41 ◼   ► when you're just watching the video and hopefully it feels like, oh, that was great and that

00:36:45 ◼   ► simple and that was straightforward. And then when you go and read the Wikipedia page you feel like,

00:36:49 ◼   ► "Oh okay, this makes total sense," but you've also now heard it once before. But yeah, fact-checking

00:36:54 ◼   ► this kind of thing is ever since the Ticoi incident, they've definitely tuned up the

00:37:00 ◼   ► fact-checking for sure, but stuff always gets through. When I think about the sort of mistakes

00:37:07 ◼   ► that get through in the videos, I do have a bunch of levels. Like I talked about this in the "CGB

00:37:14 ◼   ► "Oh, there's sort of different ways to categorize what kind of mistakes can there be?"

00:37:20 ◼   ► But even within those categories, I sort of subdivide things.

00:37:24 ◼   ► So there are a few things in this video which I regard as blunders that made it through,

00:37:29 ◼   ► but they're all on a level where it's like, "I think it's fine."

00:37:32 ◼   ► There's typos. Typos to me are the kind of blunders where it's so small, I just, I'm not wildly concerned.

00:37:41 ◼   ► It's like I spell San Francisco wrong at one point in the video.

00:37:44 ◼   ► It's like, that's fine.

00:37:45 ◼   ► I can live with San Francisco having two C's in it.

00:37:48 ◼   ► Wait, but it has two C's.

00:37:51 ◼   ► No, I see what you did.

00:37:52 ◼   ► I see.

00:37:53 ◼   ► No, I didn't put two C's in it in my head.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Did you put a C after the N?

00:37:57 ◼   ► Is that what you did?

00:37:58 ◼   ► There's no S.

00:37:59 ◼   ► It's like San Francisco.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Yeah, San Francisco.

00:38:02 ◼   ► I like that.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that's also one of those cases where by the time the video was actually published,

00:38:09 ◼   ► something like a dozen people had seen the video and exactly zero people had spotted that

00:38:15 ◼   ► San Francisco was typed wrong, including me and everyone working on the video and everyone else

00:38:19 ◼   ► I showed it to. So it's like, that's fine. I can live with that. The ones that are not so obvious

00:38:26 ◼   ► for people is pronunciation errors. There's a couple of places where I just pronounce the name

00:38:31 ◼   ► wrong. And this is one that is always frustrating because it's also one of these cases where it is,

00:38:38 ◼   ► If you're not from the place, it can be surprisingly hard to try to find what is the

00:38:45 ◼   ► correct local pronunciation of this town name.

00:38:48 ◼   ► I was going on YouTube for some of them trying to find like local news broadcasts from the town.

00:38:53 ◼   ► To be like, how are they saying the name?

00:38:55 ◼   ► But you can end up getting like a bunch of different ones.

00:38:57 ◼   ► And then there's just the actual problem of the performance of it.

00:39:01 ◼   ► Where when you say it, when you're recording it, you can still just mess it up sometimes

00:39:07 ◼   ► and get it wrong.

00:39:08 ◼   ► So I think the worst one in there is I say Penumbra, North Dakota.

00:39:13 ◼   ► I looked at that.

00:39:13 ◼   ► I cannot tell you how many times with listening to the pronunciation guides.

00:39:19 ◼   ► I know that there is no R sound in that town name.

00:39:22 ◼   ► It didn't stop me that every time I said it in all of the recordings, like I said

00:39:28 ◼   ► it wrong in a slightly different way.

00:39:30 ◼   ► And I had to just go with, well, I'm going to take the take.

00:39:33 ◼   ► That's the least wrong take.

00:39:34 ◼   ► It's like, I'm sorry.

00:39:36 ◼   ► PEM... oh god I can't even do it now like Pembina, North Dakota? I'm very sorry that I got you wrong.

00:39:42 ◼   ► I tried, I swear I tried, but it just ended up with an R that doesn't exist there. You're always

00:39:48 ◼   ► going to run up against this kind of local knowledge and yeah it's extremely hard being

00:39:55 ◼   ► on the other side of the world to try to like nail all of that stuff down.

00:39:59 ◼   ► I don't think it makes any difference that you're here rather than there for it being easier.

00:40:04 ◼   ► I guess what I mean is it would be easier if I lived in the town, right?

00:40:07 ◼   ► Well yeah, exactly.

00:40:10 ◼   ► But that's kind of my point of why I thought this one might be tricky is that

00:40:13 ◼   ► there is that exact thing of there are lots of people

00:40:17 ◼   ► that are intimately familiar with the places and the routes that you're talking about.

00:40:22 ◼   ► Like for example, I'm very sure that some of the weird roads that you've mentioned,

00:40:27 ◼   ► if you actually drive them, oh like you say it ends here, but actually there's like a little

00:40:31 ◼   ► where you know like if you're from that area like oh no it's not as simple as that.

00:40:35 ◼   ► This is also like what stuff do you include in the video and what stuff do you don't include in the

00:40:38 ◼   ► video and there's a lot of things that were not included and one of them is that a lot of places

00:40:44 ◼   ► are dual signed so a road will be oh this is actually two interstates at the same time and

00:40:51 ◼   ► then you can you can also run into some weird situations where a route is dual signed in the

00:40:57 ◼   ► sense that this is both of the interstates, but they only have one sign for which interstate

00:41:04 ◼   ► it is there. You can run into an opposite problem where, like I've seen some people

00:41:08 ◼   ► leave comments for like local areas where they go like, "Oh, you said this road is

00:41:13 ◼   ► interstate whatever, but it isn't. It's actually like US Route this." I am aware of

00:41:18 ◼   ► that, but it is because there isn't a sign saying that that is interstate whatever, but

00:41:24 ◼   ► looked it up as like, "Yes, but the state receives federal funds."

00:41:28 ◼   ► So this is even worse, where people think you're wrong.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Actually.

00:41:33 ◼   ► This is the case for...

00:41:37 ◼   ► There's a section where I talk about the interstates in Maryland,

00:41:40 ◼   ► and it's like, I knew this was going to happen,

00:41:41 ◼   ► but I just wasn't going to explain it in the video of saying,

00:41:44 ◼   ► "Oh, Maryland has all of these interstates,"

00:41:46 ◼   ► but people in Maryland going like,

00:41:47 ◼   ► "I don't know what you're talking about.

00:41:48 ◼   ► Like this interstate isn't there."

00:41:50 ◼   ► Yeah, it's because it is a federal interstate,

00:41:53 ◼   ► but it is not locally labeled as such. But I just cannot possibly get into this at this point in

00:42:00 ◼   ► time and discuss all of these things. The other one that has come up sometimes is, I've seen a

00:42:05 ◼   ► few people message me about getting the state highways wrong. In the beginning, I mentioned,

00:42:10 ◼   ► "Oh, there's US routes 50 and 60." And several people have messaged me like, "Haha, you got the

00:42:16 ◼   ► states backward." No, they're in the right order. The US routes go in the opposite direction. They're

00:42:21 ◼   ► numbered top to bottom instead of bottom to top. I just didn't discuss it in the video, which I do

00:42:26 ◼   ► in retrospect think like I probably should have mentioned that, but there's again there's just so

00:42:30 ◼   ► many things like what can you possibly mention. That stuff is fine like I don't mind that but it

00:42:35 ◼   ► is funny where you get people who will correct you about something and you're like "no actually

00:42:40 ◼   ► it is the opposite way but I totally understand why it superficially looks wrong." But then there's

00:42:44 ◼   ► just totally frustrating stuff where you do get something wrong like I have an error in the video

00:42:50 ◼   ► which I think is the worst one, but is also completely understandable when you hear this,

00:42:55 ◼   ► which is that I show the route I-76, which ends in, I say, Belmar, New Jersey. And so on the map,

00:43:04 ◼   ► it shows like, oh, here's I-76 and where it goes in Belmar, New Jersey. But it turns out there's

00:43:10 ◼   ► two towns called Belmar and Bel...

00:43:17 ◼   ► Marrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

00:43:17 ◼   ► "Mar" in New Jersey?

00:43:19 ◼   ► - Wait, can you spell the difference to me?

00:43:21 ◼   ► 'Cause that sounded the same.

00:43:23 ◼   ► - One of the towns is Belmar, B-E-L-M-A-R.

00:43:27 ◼   ► The other town is B-E-L-L-M-A-W-R, right?

00:43:32 ◼   ► - Oh, come on, New Jersey, what are you doing?

00:43:35 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:37 ◼   ► What is that?

00:43:38 ◼   ► - Right, so that's one of these things where it's like,

00:43:41 ◼   ► yeah, I totally, that is a mistake,

00:43:44 ◼   ► but that is also one of these cases

00:43:46 ◼   ► where it is very understandable that both me and the animator who drew the map and the two

00:43:54 ◼   ► official fact checkers I have checking everything they possibly can in the script,

00:43:58 ◼   ► all of us missed that, but I feel like that's on New Jersey. I'm sorry, you shouldn't have

00:44:04 ◼   ► these two towns. But nonetheless, every time I see that in the future, I'm going to be annoyed

00:44:12 ◼   ► of like, "Oh, god damn it, it's the wrong Belmar." It should have been "Bel-moir," or I don't even know

00:44:19 ◼   ► how to say the second one, but they're on different sides of the state, which is why local people

00:44:23 ◼   ► notice immediately. They're like, "Oh yeah, I-76 doesn't go all the way across New Jersey, it only

00:44:27 ◼   ► goes to the west side in Belmoir." I guess that's what the W is for. It's west for Belmar, west New

00:44:33 ◼   ► Jersey, and Belmoir without the W is east New Jersey. I do have to say on the opposite side,

00:44:39 ◼   ► And what's really fun is when people can add local information that there is just no way

00:44:45 ◼   ► I could have ever possibly found out.

00:44:47 ◼   ► In the video I make a quick reference to the interstate highway splits for I-35, where

00:44:55 ◼   ► it's this one exception where they have east and west branches and no other interstate

00:44:59 ◼   ► does this east-west numbering.

00:45:02 ◼   ► And I could not for the life of me figure out what the reason was and I just kind of

00:45:06 ◼   ► guess and say it in the video like, "Oh, this feels like one of these political situations

00:45:11 ◼   ► where there's two rival cities right next to each other, neither one wants to be the

00:45:17 ◼   ► one that's on the bypass, and so this 100% feels like a political decision of going,

00:45:23 ◼   ► 'Fine, we're just gonna do it east and west, and so neither of you is the bypass.'"

00:45:28 ◼   ► Except I've gotten information from people who live in the towns about how they really

00:45:33 ◼   ► know which one is the bypass because the mile markers continue being numbered in the correct

00:45:41 ◼   ► way on one side on either the east side or the west side and the mile number markers

00:45:48 ◼   ► start over on the opposite side.

00:45:51 ◼   ► Aha!

00:45:52 ◼   ► If you're a local you totally know which one is the bypassed city and which one is the

00:45:58 ◼   ► real city.

00:45:59 ◼   ► I really love that, like when people can add information that's like, if I had spent a thousand years researching this script, I would never have come across that piece of information.

00:46:12 ◼   ► But someone living locally can make it more fun.

00:46:15 ◼   ► fun.

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00:48:07 ◼   ► As the years have gone on, there is just a crazy amount of pressure that is very hard

00:48:12 ◼   ► to explain of "you're gonna make a video on a topic.

00:48:19 ◼   ► You're not an expert in that topic, but also you know almost every expert in the world

00:48:26 ◼   ► will end up watching this video, along with potentially a couple of million other people

00:48:33 ◼   ► who will also have random information they can add to the topic."

00:48:37 ◼   ► I just cannot explain what the pressure of that feels like.

00:48:40 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems horrible.

00:48:41 ◼   ► It is something that over the years has definitely increased

00:48:46 ◼   ► and did a big step function increase after the Ticoi incident.

00:48:50 ◼   ► Well, yeah, I mean, this is that thing that I think we've spoken about a lot since then,

00:48:53 ◼   ► which is it's not necessarily my challenge to you,

00:48:56 ◼   ► but it is a point that I bring up, which is like,

00:48:58 ◼   ► you have made it worse for yourself.

00:49:02 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:49:02 ◼   ► in that you refuse to be comfortable

00:49:06 ◼   ► with even the smallest errors.

00:49:08 ◼   ► Because, I mean, going back to Ticoi,

00:49:12 ◼   ► again, it's like you consider that error to have been massive.

00:49:16 ◼   ► 99.999999% of the world would not,

00:49:22 ◼   ► like it wasn't really that important for that video

00:49:25 ◼   ► that you said that this place had a different type of rocket

00:49:29 ◼   ► than what it actually had.

00:49:31 ◼   ► So then it's like, as well as the world putting its pressure on you, you put pressure on yourself,

00:49:39 ◼   ► which then makes the world put more pressure on you.

00:49:43 ◼   ► And it just continues from there to like be correct.

00:49:46 ◼   ► But I don't think I would be any different if I was in your shoes because at the point

00:49:53 ◼   ► where you are with the type of stuff that you make videos about, you are right that

00:49:57 ◼   ► like you have to become an expert in everything and that seems horrible

00:50:05 ◼   ► yeah it's a bit different like it's not that i'm an expert right

00:50:15 ◼   ► but i play one on youtube yeah okay yeah there there is some truth to that yeah i'm not an

00:50:20 ◼   ► expert but i play one on youtube is not wrong for those 10 minutes do you have to beat that

00:50:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I would rephrase it like, "Oh, I need to become temporarily one of the best

00:50:31 ◼   ► informed laymen on this topic."

00:50:34 ◼   ► And again, not so much with this video, but with other stuff I've worked on and stuff

00:50:38 ◼   ► that I am working on.

00:50:40 ◼   ► There is also this problem, which I think is really not obvious to people, about experts

00:50:46 ◼   ► in the field disagree.

00:50:49 ◼   ► And so one of the skills you have to learn, which is very weird and also very demoralizing

00:50:56 ◼   ► about the whole world is you have to become good at picking which expert do you think

00:51:02 ◼   ► is the reasonable expert in a field where you are not an expert, which can be kind of

00:51:07 ◼   ► crazy making sometimes when people disagree with each other.

00:51:10 ◼   ► That's common sense, right?

00:51:12 ◼   ► I guess is what you're talking about here though.

00:51:15 ◼   ► You're using your gut.

00:51:16 ◼   ► How else would you do it?

00:51:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think using your gut is too simple.

00:51:19 ◼   ► I think I have some basic heuristics

00:51:22 ◼   ► that are helpful in this,

00:51:23 ◼   ► but they're a little bit difficult to articulate.

00:51:25 ◼   ► - I don't think you could, even if you tried.

00:51:27 ◼   ► - The best I can do just off the top of my head is

00:51:30 ◼   ► I'm looking for experts who are consistent

00:51:35 ◼   ► across other domains as well.

00:51:40 ◼   ► You're looking for the expert who also doesn't seem to

00:51:45 ◼   ► contradict any of the areas that they're butting up against. Now, of course, that's a recursion

00:51:51 ◼   ► problem of, "Well, how do you know those other areas that they're butting up against are correct?"

00:51:55 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:51:55 ◼   ► B: I'm very aware that's a system that is extremely sensitive to the initial state of

00:52:03 ◼   ► what are you assuming is correct and not correct. So I read a couple books about the interstate

00:52:08 ◼   ► system in preparation for this video, which again, you don't know where you're going to find

00:52:12 ◼   ► interesting stuff ahead of time. You can only know by like reading through the books. And

00:52:17 ◼   ► it can just be a red flag where someone will like mention something about the interstate

00:52:22 ◼   ► and you go like, that just doesn't seem to fit with other things that I think are true.

00:52:27 ◼   ► And then you sort of dig into this and you go, Oh, okay. It's like more complicated than

00:52:31 ◼   ► was portrayed in this book.

00:52:33 ◼   ► That's weird though, right? Do you see the weirdness in that, that you're coming along

00:52:38 ◼   ► and making a piece of content about a certain subject area

00:52:43 ◼   ► that will probably become the most consumed thing

00:52:47 ◼   ► about that subject area.

00:52:48 ◼   ► And there are people that are either considered to be

00:52:51 ◼   ► or consider themselves to be experts,

00:52:53 ◼   ► but then you have to judge them.

00:52:56 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, no, that's, but this is what I mean by like,

00:52:58 ◼   ► like the totally crazy pressure of this.

00:53:01 ◼   ► - As we're laying this out,

00:53:02 ◼   ► I'm like, oh boy, that sounds horrible.

00:53:05 ◼   ► Why do you do this?

00:53:07 ◼   ► You should just make the outside ones.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Forget all this nonsense.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Yes.

00:53:11 ◼   ► So like this is, this is one of the reasons why, you know, the past few

00:53:14 ◼   ► episodes we've been talking about, like thinking about future production

00:53:17 ◼   ► and thinking about a bunch of stuff.

00:53:18 ◼   ► And one of the things that I was going through in my feeling tapped out about

00:53:22 ◼   ► video production was it's like at this point in my writing career as well, like

00:53:27 ◼   ► I had just had, I have a ton of video topics to choose from, lots of which are

00:53:33 ◼   ► 20% to 40% complete because I've done like some initial research and

00:53:37 ◼   ► it seems interesting. But the problem is there are so many things that seem interesting and

00:53:45 ◼   ► simple until you ask three questions in a row about that topic. And then you go, "Oh,

00:53:52 ◼   ► this is not as it seems." And it can be just like hugely dispiriting about the world in

00:53:59 ◼   ► trying to think through like, what do you think is true? And what do you think is true

00:54:05 ◼   ► enough that you're willing to say it to like a million people. I think back to when I first

00:54:11 ◼   ► started doing this, it is laughable to me about how relatively carefree and breezy I

00:54:17 ◼   ► was and just how even that old past Grey felt like he was cautious about sources. And even

00:54:26 ◼   ► that old past Grey already knew like, "Oh, well, don't, you know, don't use a newspaper

00:54:30 ◼   ► as a source. That's worse than nothing." Current Grey looks at him and is like, "Oh, kid, you

00:54:35 ◼   ► don't have any idea how bad this is gonna get. Yeah, it's a very strange

00:54:39 ◼   ► situation and so it is one of these areas where lots of topics I feel like

00:54:44 ◼   ► boy if I could lighten up on this I could make lots of topics so much more

00:54:51 ◼   ► easily than I currently can but it's very hard to lighten up on this

00:54:57 ◼   ► and just when videos go out to a big audience like it just it is a pressure

00:55:01 ◼   ► that ends up really like building on itself over time.

00:55:04 ◼   ► I mean I can sympathize with this a little like so I kind of I understand what you're saying

00:55:08 ◼   ► there are things that I say or topics that I've covered where I've ended up thinking oh this is

00:55:15 ◼   ► a good idea and then it comes out that there's like people disagree with it or have like a

00:55:21 ◼   ► difference of opinion or you know there are certain things I know that if I say them I'm

00:55:27 ◼   ► going to get a lot of pushback for it. But this is like just a thing that you

00:55:32 ◼   ► learn over time and it's kind of weird it's like I kind of think of this as

00:55:37 ◼   ► this is a very strange metaphor that I'm trying to build here but okay like a

00:55:42 ◼   ► stone can be eroded over time right so like we are the stones in this and the

00:55:49 ◼   ► erosion is like feedback and it can have two effects where it can either smooth

00:55:55 ◼   ► you to it or it can make things more jagged and so like this is where I'm

00:56:01 ◼   ► saying like sometimes there's like a thing that I know if I want to talk

00:56:04 ◼   ► about this I'm gonna get a lot of feedback on it and like this is me

00:56:08 ◼   ► accepting that and over time like that part is just smoothed out and I'm just

00:56:12 ◼   ► alright fine I understand what's gonna happen here I'm just gonna go for it

00:56:17 ◼   ► there is Geeva gonna be a lot of difference of opinion or on the good

00:56:19 ◼   ► side a lot of people that are agree with me that kind of thing but then

00:56:23 ◼   ► there's like this other part of it where you don't even realize that something

00:56:28 ◼   ► you're about to do which is innocuous to you is going to either be A) wrong and

00:56:33 ◼   ► you're gonna hear about that a lot or B) you think this was just an opinion

00:56:39 ◼   ► that lots of people have but it turns out a lot of people just disagree with

00:56:41 ◼   ► you and that's where it like gets jagged and it's kind of about trying to make

00:56:45 ◼   ► that erosion over time completely smoothed out and that can either be by

00:56:49 ◼   ► accepting things or understanding them fully, correcting them, researching them

00:56:53 ◼   ► over time right and so I have this on like a way smaller degree for a bunch of

00:56:59 ◼   ► reasons like one I don't purport to be an expert in anything. It's actually

00:57:03 ◼   ► kind of my entire career is not being an expert in anything but being interested

00:57:07 ◼   ► in a bunch of things and talking to people who are more experts than me.

00:57:11 ◼   ► So like that part doesn't really bother me if I don't understand it whatever.

00:57:14 ◼   ► Like I'm learning like everybody else.

00:57:17 ◼   ► But also like just the scale of people

00:57:20 ◼   ► that consume my content is so much smaller than yours.

00:57:23 ◼   ► And then also I think the thing that is a benefit for me

00:57:25 ◼   ► is the vast majority of people

00:57:28 ◼   ► that are listening to my shows know me to some degree.

00:57:32 ◼   ► - Yes, yeah.

00:57:33 ◼   ► - And let me off more.

00:57:36 ◼   ► Because they know me, right?

00:57:37 ◼   ► They're like, I say a thing and it's wrong.

00:57:40 ◼   ► And they're like, Myke, you got that wrong.

00:57:41 ◼   ► But it's very rarely like you idiot

00:57:43 ◼   ► because they know me, they know that like,

00:57:46 ◼   ► oh, I said this thing incorrectly or I made a mistake,

00:57:49 ◼   ► that it was a mistake,

00:57:50 ◼   ► they're maybe more willing to accept that.

00:57:52 ◼   ► But you get so many people that watch your YouTube channel,

00:57:55 ◼   ► they don't know you.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And so it's like a whole different thing.

00:58:00 ◼   ► Or like, even if they watch all your videos,

00:58:02 ◼   ► this type of content, like podcasts and stuff,

00:58:04 ◼   ► people get much more of a sense of the person.

00:58:07 ◼   ► And so I think can be kinder in that way.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Where like, even just like people

00:58:12 ◼   ► that have watched your videos for years,

00:58:14 ◼   ► maybe still don't have that much of a sense

00:58:16 ◼   ► of your personality as they would get through

00:58:18 ◼   ► just listening to you talk for an hour or two

00:58:20 ◼   ► once a month, you know?

00:58:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, for sure.

00:58:22 ◼   ► - And so people I think are maybe a bit more,

00:58:24 ◼   ► ah, you're stupid, why did you say this?

00:58:28 ◼   ► So my point is, I feel like I can understand

00:58:30 ◼   ► a little bit what you're talking about,

00:58:32 ◼   ► but I can see how it's way, way harsher.

00:58:35 ◼   ► - It's a thing I've talked to other creators about.

00:58:39 ◼   ► I think anyone who's in the educational field on YouTube, everyone experiences

00:58:44 ◼   ► this to some extent or another, which is you get started in this because you're

00:58:49 ◼   ► really just interested in a bunch of stuff and you want to talk about it.

00:58:53 ◼   ► And like the, the problem is as time goes on.

00:58:57 ◼   ► In a way, I would love to start every video off with, Hey, I've spent

00:59:05 ◼   ► a lot of time researching this.

00:59:07 ◼   ► This is the best version of this that I can do.

00:59:10 ◼   ► But also, you know, like I'm not an expert in the interstate system.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I'm not a transportation engineer.

00:59:17 ◼   ► I am a person who just spends a lot of time on his own reading in a room.

00:59:23 ◼   ► That's what I am.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And like, I try to turn this into an interesting thing for other people to watch.

00:59:28 ◼   ► You can't do that in front of every video.

00:59:30 ◼   ► It's horrifically boring.

00:59:32 ◼   ► It just doesn't work.

00:59:33 ◼   ► There's this phenomenon, like I don't have a good word for this.

00:59:37 ◼   ► people can put on you a level of expertise that you yourself are not claiming.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And the only way to try to push back against that is to constantly remind people that you're

00:59:52 ◼   ► not an expert in a way that I personally find just tedious and annoying and not worth doing.

00:59:57 ◼   ► - I mean, and it also devalues the work that you've done too.

01:00:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly. I think if anyone watches a bunch of educational YouTubers,

01:00:04 ◼   ► you will see people do this. This is the reason why people will in their videos just be like,

01:00:10 ◼   ► "I'm just an idiot who doesn't know anything," right? And they'll just say this and like,

01:00:14 ◼   ► "I hate it. I hate it." When creators do that. But I also understand why creators are doing that,

01:00:21 ◼   ► because they're trying to push back both for the audience and I also think for themselves,

01:00:26 ◼   ► the ever-mounting pressure. - Oh, I think it's vastly weighted

01:00:30 ◼   ► towards the person or the audience and it's not a criticism because I do it.

01:00:34 ◼   ► But it's just like if you constantly get a certain type of feedback like

01:00:39 ◼   ► ultimately it changes you because you want to stop getting that feedback if

01:00:43 ◼   ► you don't like it and this is also in the inverse as well if you keep getting

01:00:47 ◼   ► feedback which is good and you keep doing more of that more people like it.

01:00:51 ◼   ► I just said this is like super you know good problem to have kind of problem

01:00:56 ◼   ► right? Yeah of course. But it's still a tough thing to deal with when creating

01:01:00 ◼   ► content especially at the level that you're at right? Yeah yeah. I mean look I

01:01:04 ◼   ► just did it okay so what I've just done this is an example of the exact thing

01:01:08 ◼   ► that I'm talking about where I feel like if I didn't say this what I just said

01:01:15 ◼   ► people will go "oh nice for you" yeah exactly and that is what that is a

01:01:20 ◼   ► reflex that I have where I feel like I have to say it because of the feedback

01:01:25 ◼   ► back that I would otherwise see of like look at these guys complaining about how

01:01:30 ◼   ► terrible their lives are when they have these dream jobs which we know now I

01:01:36 ◼   ► would love to believe that inherently people understand that in the

01:01:41 ◼   ► conversation most people do I think the vast majority of people do but it tends

01:01:47 ◼   ► to be that there is a minority of people it is the quote unquote vocal minority

01:01:52 ◼   ► who will tell you and will complain to you about you.

01:01:56 ◼   ► And over time, that is like the erosion

01:02:01 ◼   ► where I feel like I can't have a conversation like this

01:02:04 ◼   ► without giving that disclaimer.

01:02:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's nothing more frustrating

01:02:08 ◼   ► than listening to someone who issues a disclaimer

01:02:10 ◼   ► before every one of their sentences.

01:02:12 ◼   ► - Because I know, but I just said that.

01:02:14 ◼   ► There are people that are like, "All right, I get it."

01:02:15 ◼   ► Or, "You don't have to say this, I understand.

01:02:18 ◼   ► "I'm not an idiot, I understand."

01:02:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you can hear people sometimes

01:02:22 ◼   ► in the public arena get completely consumed by this disease where they issue a disclaimer

01:02:27 ◼   ► in front of every sentence and it makes them just interminable to listen to. And this is

01:02:32 ◼   ► talking about like creating content that I know a younger me would be interested in.

01:02:36 ◼   ► Us having this conversation on this podcast, I think for most listeners, the interesting

01:02:42 ◼   ► part of this is hearing about the actual true behind the scenes. What is it like to be a

01:02:51 ◼   ► person who makes these videos. And this is one of these things that has been very present

01:02:58 ◼   ► in my life, especially since Ticoi, but even without Ticoi it would have happened anyway,

01:03:04 ◼   ► of this gradual ratcheting up of pressure from both inside and outside that can make

01:03:11 ◼   ► projects just way harder. And it's like, yeah, that's totally the byproduct of having

01:03:17 ◼   ► a very successful YouTube channel. But it doesn't change the fact that like, oh, would

01:03:21 ◼   ► Would you like to know what this is like? Here's one of the things that you might not

01:03:25 ◼   ► have considered, that there's this ratchet that just increases over time. This is one

01:03:30 ◼   ► of the things that it's like to do this.

01:03:32 ◼   ► My assumption is, or the assumption that I wish I would remember more, is that the people

01:03:37 ◼   ► listening to this show probably fall into, the vast majority of them fall into a couple

01:03:42 ◼   ► of categories. These are people that do make stuff, or people that want to.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Or people that are just interested in what the life of the people that are content creators.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Sometimes I think it would be easier if I could remember that, but if you've listened

01:03:56 ◼   ► to this conversation and you are an aspiring or starting out content creator, I think the

01:04:03 ◼   ► thing that is important not to take away from this is that you need to be an expert. Do

01:04:09 ◼   ► what we were saying or what Gray was saying he was doing at the beginning where it was

01:04:13 ◼   ► research, but not exhaustive like what he does, right? Because the point is still that

01:04:19 ◼   ► You can do enough when you're starting out and be quote unquote correct enough and do

01:04:25 ◼   ► the thing because if you try and do things to Grey's level when you're beginning, you're

01:04:29 ◼   ► never going to get started.

01:04:31 ◼   ► You just won't.

01:04:32 ◼   ► But you don't need to.

01:04:34 ◼   ► This is the thing that happens when you reach that point.

01:04:38 ◼   ► I just feel like that's the thing that if I'm thinking, this is a very meta, like we're

01:04:43 ◼   ► like 17 levels deep into this at this moment.

01:04:47 ◼   ► of like, if I'm thinking about like, who listens to the show or who we expect

01:04:52 ◼   ► listens to the show, what are they going to take away from this?

01:04:54 ◼   ► I wouldn't want people to be like, Oh man, I'm never going to finish this

01:04:58 ◼   ► video if that's what I have to do.

01:05:00 ◼   ► I also think part of the value is also just understanding what

01:05:06 ◼   ► may be coming down the line.

01:05:08 ◼   ► This is one of these cases where I had this at the start of my career from

01:05:14 ◼   ► knowing like, "Oh, what is it like to actually be a famous person?"

01:05:18 ◼   ► And you go, "Oh, there's lots of things about that that are

01:05:22 ◼   ► really terrible that people who are famous

01:05:26 ◼   ► will not talk about in public for these sorts of reasons, they just know they'll

01:05:30 ◼   ► get terrible feedback about like, "Oh, listen to you complaining about your

01:05:34 ◼   ► amazing life." - I feel like that has turned a little bit in the last few

01:05:38 ◼   ► years, or like a little, like at least just I

01:05:42 ◼   ► I think that seeing the beginning of a change,

01:05:45 ◼   ► and I think sport is especially a place

01:05:47 ◼   ► where it's coming out, like mental health in sport,

01:05:50 ◼   ► I think is really starting to see a crest here.

01:05:53 ◼   ► This has been happening quite a bit in tennis, especially,

01:05:56 ◼   ► in the last maybe year or two.

01:05:59 ◼   ► There's been a couple of very famous tennis players

01:06:01 ◼   ► who have been talking about their mental health issues

01:06:04 ◼   ► and how it's affecting them on the court.

01:06:06 ◼   ► You know, I'm a big F1 fan,

01:06:08 ◼   ► and it's happening there a little bit more now too,

01:06:11 ◼   ► of people being open with the fact that

01:06:14 ◼   ► it can be really hard to do what they do

01:06:17 ◼   ► in a way that still a lot of people reject

01:06:21 ◼   ► and they're just like,

01:06:21 ◼   ► "Just shut up and play the sport," kind of thing.

01:06:24 ◼   ► But where I see that there is more understanding

01:06:28 ◼   ► from younger people,

01:06:30 ◼   ► just in general,

01:06:32 ◼   ► the degeneration below us is much more in tune

01:06:36 ◼   ► with mental health as a thing,

01:06:38 ◼   ► which I think is really good.

01:06:40 ◼   ► But I think it's allowing for some people in the public eye

01:06:45 ◼   ► to start actively talking about what it is like

01:06:49 ◼   ► and for that to be accepted more.

01:06:51 ◼   ► I feel like we're still a long way away, I think,

01:06:54 ◼   ► from a celebrity being able to openly talk about

01:06:57 ◼   ► how their life can be hard because they're a celebrity,

01:07:00 ◼   ► because I think there is just this natural thinking of like,

01:07:03 ◼   ► you are rich and famous, what more could you want?

01:07:07 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Right?

01:07:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I filed that example under the like quote unacceptable in quotes thing that is

01:07:14 ◼   ► acceptable actually to talk about.

01:07:17 ◼   ► I mean the sorts of things that people will just not talk about in public.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Oh I know, but my point more is there will always be that way because that's just people,

01:07:27 ◼   ► right?

01:07:28 ◼   ► There will always be stuff that you say behind closed doors kind of thing.

01:07:31 ◼   ► But it's more that I think that there is starting to become more of an acceptable change for

01:07:36 ◼   ► people to say stuff because a period of time ago that was unacceptable to say that my life

01:07:44 ◼   ► as a celebrity can be hard because of my fame right like I feel like that is a thing that

01:07:50 ◼   ► was unacceptable to say so my point is just it is changing the mental health part of it

01:07:55 ◼   ► is becoming more acceptable to suffer with and talk about right rather than like hey

01:08:01 ◼   ► I have these problems I feel I can't talk to anyone about them or speak about them in

01:08:05 ◼   ► open at all. But yeah, of course there will always be difficulties and things that people

01:08:10 ◼   ► will go through that they won't talk about in public. That's just life.

01:08:13 ◼   ► Yeah, just in case people are desperately wanting to know like what the kind of stuff

01:08:18 ◼   ► is that I'm talking about, I'll just mention that Tim Ferriss actually has a really interesting

01:08:22 ◼   ► article about being famous. I know you're gonna hate it, but he's like, he's the example

01:08:29 ◼   ► of what are the kinds of things that people just don't want to talk about, right? So I

01:08:35 ◼   ► I hate doing this kind of thing where it's like, you're not saying things in front of the audience,

01:08:40 ◼   ► then it leads people to wonder.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Is the article "11 Reasons Not to Become Famous"?

01:08:44 ◼   ► I don't know what the title of the article is off the top of my head.

01:08:46 ◼   ► I mean, it probably is.

01:08:49 ◼   ► The fact that it's a listicle is just like my god.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Well, I mean, look, you've got to optimize for SEO, right?

01:08:58 ◼   ► Anyway, like, I did not intend to really get off on this major tangent because it's funny,

01:09:03 ◼   ► Like I actually picked this topic precisely because it has the fewest

01:09:08 ◼   ► number of these sorts of problems.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:10 ◼   ► The numbering system for the interstate is, I don't know, as close to math as

01:09:18 ◼   ► the topic can get where it's like, yeah, this was just a plan that some people

01:09:21 ◼   ► made and here, let me explain what the plan is and it has the smallest number

01:09:27 ◼   ► of places where this can go wrong.

01:09:29 ◼   ► Whereas, one of the videos I've been working on for a very long time now,

01:09:34 ◼   ► that I just don't know if it will ever see the light of day, is a

01:09:39 ◼   ► video that is related to history.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And it's just one of those videos where it's really dispiriting because

01:09:48 ◼   ► every part you dig into, you can go, "Oh, but is that true?

01:09:54 ◼   ► What is the actual source for this?

01:09:57 ◼   ► how do we know that this is the case?" And it's like, I really like what this video

01:10:02 ◼   ► could be, but it has been now years in the works and just constantly runs up against

01:10:09 ◼   ► this "oh, what is true" problem. "Oh, also, I'm not an expert in this period of

01:10:16 ◼   ► history." And so now, let me tell you, if there's something that experts can disagree

01:10:21 ◼   ► on, it's history. And then like, okay, I've got to try to make a call about what is the

01:10:26 ◼   ► reasonable way to describe this or what are the parts to skip over and then you also just

01:10:31 ◼   ► have the like everybody always wants you to talk about everything issue as well which

01:10:35 ◼   ► is it is a funny thing with this video on the interstate stuff because here's another

01:10:40 ◼   ► example of this reverse problem where lots of people left comments where they're like

01:10:45 ◼   ► oh but you should have talked about how the mile markers work that the mile markers are

01:10:50 ◼   ► showing you like how far along on the highway you are and all of this kind of stuff it's

01:10:55 ◼   ► like, is it I understand that you want me to talk about the mile markers, but actually they're

01:11:00 ◼   ► different in every single state. And so the like, oh, you left out this interesting piece of

01:11:05 ◼   ► information comments are missing. Yeah, but it doesn't actually work consistently everywhere.

01:11:12 ◼   ► So this idea that you have of the mile markers are useful as a navigational guide. It's like,

01:11:17 ◼   ► I didn't talk about that, because it's not true. And they frequently change just at the state

01:11:22 ◼   ► borders. So it's just even on a relatively straightforward topic there's just an endless

01:11:27 ◼   ► amount of stuff like this and it is also why like on publication day it's always a huge relief but

01:11:34 ◼   ► there's always this feeling of like oh god I hope I just didn't mess up something real bad that I

01:11:40 ◼   ► didn't even know about and you never know until it goes out.